SOURCE: Weathers, Winston. “‘Blackberry Winter’ and the Use of Archetypes.” Studies in Short Fiction 1, no. 1 (fall 1963): 45-51.

In the following excerpt, Weathers explores the elements of setting, character, and action in “Blackberry Winter” in terms of archetypes that address “the myth of human maturing.”

In an almost exemplary literary fashion, Robert Penn Warren has in “Blackberry Winter” constructed from traditional devices and essential devices1 a provocative formula for literary experience. Warren has constructed a literary vehicle out of elements—descriptions, events, ideas, characters, images, rhetorical and poetic figures, and verbalizations—which have come to him either from the literary tradition of which he is a part or from his own imaginative and creative awareness of the world around him.2 Using these literary devices, both conventional and essential, he constructs them—as though they were building blocks—into larger literary elements, which we may call structures, that are in...